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Obituary: On Barasbi Bgazhnokov (1947-2020), by Sufian Zhemukhov

December 30, 2020

Circassian activists achieve demolition of monument to Russian soldiers in Adler

July 09, 2020

Representatives of Circassian society have begun collecting signatures to an appeal to Putin about a new monument in Adler

July 06, 2020
Who Are The Circassians?
The Circassians: A Forgotten Genocide?

Analysis

Nationalism and archaeology in the Caucasus
Nationalism, politics, and the practice of archaeology in the Caucasus

Nationalism, politics, and the practice of archaeology, edited by Philip L. Kohl and Clare Fawcett

Cambridge University Press 1995

Nationalism, politics, and the practice of archaeology in the Caucasus (Part III Eastern Europe and Eurasia) pp. 149-174

By Philip L. Kohl and Gocha R. Tsetskhladze

This chapter examines the politics of archaeology in an area that can justly be viewed either as part of the northern frontier of the modern Middle East (and ancient Near East) or the southeastern boundary of Europe. One of the fascinations of Caucasia - both Ciscaucasia and Transcaucasia - is that it is a region where European (Christian) and Oriental (here Islamic) traditions meet or, more appropriately today, collide. It is also characterized by exceptional, almost unparalleled ethnic and linguistic diversity, making it - depending upon one's temperament - either an ethnographer's dream or nightmare.

In addition to sectarian, linguistic, and ethnic diversity, the Caucasus is characterized by a very long and vivid historical consciousness, extending back with rich historical and then archaeological documentation for millennia. Archaeology and ancient history are exceptionally alive and meaningful for all the myriad peoples of the Caucasus. Today, given the collapse of the former Soviet Union, it is a very volatile region replete with numerous territorial disputes and several exceptionally bloody and explosive ethnic conflicts. Given all these conditions, it is an area where one would not expect the practice of archaeology to be an idle academic pursuit, unrelated to contemporary politics. One is not disappointed.

This paper will demonstrate the political nature of archaeology in the Caucasus by relating several examples illustrating this fact, proceeding first regionally, considering interpretations of the prehistoric record in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, and the northern Caucasus, and then chronologically with an evaluation of Caucasian archaeological evidence for the classical period, particularly as it relates to Greek colonization in western Georgia, beginning in the mid-sixth century BC. As it proceeds, it will also attempt to establish criteria for distinguishing acceptable "readings" of Caucasian prehistory from serious "misreadings" or distortions of that past that may result in the systematic suppression, if not slaughter, of one people by another.

At the outset, we wish to emphasize that, while we are being critical of the practices of many local Caucasian archaeologists, this does not mean that we are not appreciative of their many substantive achievements in reconstructing their incredibly rich remote past; while we generalize critically about the behaviors of entire peoples (and as generalizations, there are, of course, numerous exceptions), this does not mean that we are at all demeaning or holding suspect the proud and distinctive cultural traditions that make the area so fascinating and intellectually stimulating. If we spend more time illustrating the questionable practices of archaeologists of one culture and fail to mention those of another, it is not a political statement of support for the latter on our part. Sadly, no group is above criticism. Current ethnic conflicts, based on territorial political disputes in the Caucasus and all too often justified by archaeological "readings" of an always deficient, never satisfactory record, are extremely complex and, unfortunately, lack simple solution.

We argue against an "essentialist" conception of culture, particularly as applied to the archaeological record. This view maintains that cultures are Nationalism and archaeology in the Caucasus  like minerals that have crystallized; once formed, they assume a distinctive shape that characterizes them "from time immemorial" to the present. An essentialist (or primordialist) view holds that Azeris, Armenians, Georgians, Ossetians, Abkhazians, Chechens, etc. have "always" existed in a manner that blurs necessary distinctions between culture, language, and race. This conception of culture, which is adopted consciously or not by most Caucasian archaeologists, is opposed to the view of cultures as constantly "in the making," historically rooted, open-ended systems which are continuously transforming themselves, borrowing from their neighbors, and being inextricably caught up in historical processes much larger than themselves (Wolf 1984; Kohl 1992:173-4).

Download the full-text document in PDF format (2.4 MB) 

  • Analysis
How Russian state pressure on regional languages is sparking civic activism in the North Caucasus by Mikail Kaplan

Mikhail Kaplan is a journalist living in Makhachkala, Dagestan.

New legislation that makes studying minority languages voluntary in Russian schools comes as signs of decreasing usage emerge.

kayseri circassian ashemez
  • Diaspora
There and back: Circassians in Anatolia, by Jim Samson

2017 Glasbene migracije: Stičisšče evropske glasbene raznolikosti . Weiss, J. (ed.). Ljubljana: Narodna in univerzitetna knijižnica [Musical Migrations: Crossroads of European Musical Diversity] p. 17-32.

Jim Samson (Royal Holloway, University of London) 

Summary

Georgian scholars like to refer to their constituent musical traditions as ‘dialects’. But visits to the borderlands of the state (notably Svaneti and Tusheti) suggest that this may be the wrong metaphor, given the affinities of these traditions with North Caucasian practices (Kabardino-Balkaria and Chechnya / Dagestan respectively). If we visit yet another Georgian ‘borderland’, Abkhazia, the issue comes into yet sharper focus, since here musical affinities with North Caucasian (Circassian) traditions serve to underline the contested politics of the state.

An Abkhaz-Adygean (Circassian) culture survives today as much (or more) in Turkey as in its ancestral homelands, following the expulsion of populations in the 1860s. It has been cultivated above all in the Circassian Associations of cities such as Kayseri and Ankara, where music and dance (even more than language) have been important markers of cultural and political identity in a context of frequent minoritarian oppression. Since the 1990s, however, return to the Caucasus has become possible, whether as occasional visits, as a vie bifurquée, or as full settlement. There can also be movement in the other direction, and of course the Internet can now enable ‘virtual returns’. In this context, music and dance become the litmus tests of allegiance. 

Key words 

Migration, exile, identity, return

Biography 

Jim Samson is Emeritus Professor of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published widely on the music of Chopin and Liszt, on analytical and aesthetic topics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, and on the cultural histories of East Central and South Eastern Europe. In 1989 he was awarded the Order of Merit from the Polish Ministry of Culture, in 2000 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, and in 2016 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Ionian University. He is currently working on a book entitled Black Sea Sketches: Music, Place and People.

***********

This paper is about Circassians, whose ancestral homeland lies north of the Greater Caucasus mountain range, but many of whom were exiled to Anatolia and beyond in the 1860s. I will get to that story shortly. However, I want to begin with Georgia, which lies south of the mountain range, and specifically with the Georgian borderlands. Everyone knows that Georgia is proud of its traditional polyphony. It has become something of a national symbol. As such it helped preserve a sense of Georgian identity during Soviet times, and it has been worn as a badge of pride since the declaration of independence in 1991. Indeed, following its recognition by UNESCO in 2001, Georgian polyphony has been all but fetishized in its homeland.[1] The scholarly emblem of this is the Centre for Traditional Polyphony at Tbilisi Conservatory, with its biennial published symposia produced by an energetic team of scholars under the direction of Rusudan Tsurtsumia.[2] Yet all this needs a little scrutiny. Georgia comprises regions that have their own languages, their own histories, and their own strongly developed sense of cultural identity. So we should, I think, be a little cautious of the tendency of Georgian scholars to label their regional polyphonic practices as musical ‘dialects’, with the implication that they are variants of a unified national culture.

In the course of fieldwork in Georgia I visited song masters in both the north-western and the north-eastern borderlands. When I listened to the music of Svaneti in the western mountains, it was immediately obvious that this simple homorhythmic polyphony had little in common with the complex textures of Guria, Mingrelia or Adjara down on the Black Sea littoral.[3] Georgian scholars have assigned various labels to it, including ‘synchronised polyphony’ and ‘chordal units polyphony’.[4] The labels are unsatisfactory (at least in translation), but they do at least draw attention to the prevailing homophony, within which there exists a kind of dialectic between independent and interdependent part movement.[5] The inclination of the singers is to a normative organum-like parallelism, coloured by non-tempered tunings. But the individual parts constantly seek to break free from this norm, deviating from the pervasive parallelism to generate idiomatic dissonant harmonies. Now the Svaneti song master Islam Pilpani assured me that you hear rather similar music on the other side of the mountain range, in what are now the Russian republics of Karachay-Cherkessia and Kabardino-Balkaria, and I was later able to confirm this on a visit to the North Caucasus. The Maykop-based ethnomusicologist Alla Sokolova told me that, aside from the language, she could barely distinguish Svaneti singing from the eastern Circassian singing in Karachay-Cherkessia (even today, political borders are not easily controlled in these high mountains). So I have to be suspicious of the pedigreed narrative about dialects. And by the way in some accounts it even becomes an historical narrative, with the Svanetian tradition represented as an early stage in the evolution of Georgian polyphony. What is clear is that cultural and political borders are out of sync.

Sometime after the trip to Svaneti I visited Tusheti in the eastern mountains. And it was while I was looking around the ethnographic museum in Zemo Alvani, on the border between Kahketi and Tusheti, that I heard a rather haunting music played on accordion in another part of the building. When I sought it out, it transpired that the performer was Eliko Torghiraidze, niece of the well-known Tushetian musician Epiro Torghiraidze, and one of the few people currently performing a traditional Tushetian repertory on the instrument today. I was taken aback when I heard this music, for it was actually a style I recognised. Six months earlier I had been in central Anatolia among the Circassian diaspora communities. The music played by Eliko instantly recalled music I had heard there, music that had originated in the North Caucasus. There were differences of course, but the underlying harmonic basis, often a simple alternation of a major triad and the minor triad a tone higher, was the same, as was the repetitive rhythm and the dense layer of trilled ornamentation over alternating pedal points.

If we insist on invoking dialects here, we might want to claim that this music is a dialect not so much of Georgian as of North Caucasian music. In other words, I was discovering that the musical idioms of the North Caucasus had spilled over the mountain range to Tusheti in eastern Georgia. Again I had to question the Georgian narrative. What we actually see in both these borderlands is a political boundary dividing a shared culture. This is not exactly uncommon. One only has to think of the traditional polyphony of Epirus, labelled by UNESCO as ‘Albanian folk iso-polyphony’, but also performed by Greek singers (in the Greek language of course) on the other side of the political border, and indeed by Vlach singers (in the Aromanian language) on both sides.[6] None of this should surprise us. It is in the nature of music to flow and to spread. Partition is not its natural condition.

The third borderland I visited was Abkhazia, whose political status, as everyone knows, is contested. For Abkhazians, theirs is a politically independent country, albeit heavily dependent economically on Russia. Yet for Georgians, and for most of the international community, it remains an occupied part of Georgian territory; it is Georgian. This is not so much a political boundary dividing a shared culture as a cultural border dividing an officially unified polity. In any case, however you view the politics, there is in truth a considerable cultural space between Georgia and Abkhazia, and it goes without saying that it has been consciously widened in recent years. The Abkhaz language belongs to a Northwest Caucasian group, entirely separate from the Georgian Kartvelian group, and it has especially close affinities with Adygean. Indeed the term ‘Abkhaz-Adygean’ is sometimes used to describe this western branch of the language, and the term also has a wider cultural resonance. The remnants of Circassian culture in the Caucasus today exist within a triangular nexus formed by Sukhum, Maykop and Nalchik, the three capitals of Abkhazia, Adygea and Kabardino-Balkaria respectively, though there are lower-level activities in Cherkessk in Karachay-Cherkessia, and especially among the Abazin populations there (it should be emphasized that Circassian peoples are in a minority in these homeland territories, and especially in Adygea).

Of my several encounters with traditional music during my stay in Abkhazia the most memorable was a vodka-fuelled rehearsal by one of several secondary ensembles that were established there during Soviet times. The ensemble is called Gunda, after a female character in the Nart sagas, which might be considered the originary epic of Circassia, and of the North Caucasus more generally. Incidentally, the distribution of Nart corpora also speaks very powerfully of a shared Abkhaz - Circassian culture,[7] and there exists a body of mid-twentieth-century recordings of Nart epic songs, notably by the once celebrated Narta amateur ensemble of so-called ’long-lived’ men, founded in 1946 and directed by Ivan Kortua. The music performed by Gunda is far removed from these early recordings. Moreover, unlike the excellent Zhyu ensemble in Maykop, directed by the multi-talented Zamudin Guche, Gunda seldom performs the Nart songs, whose minimalist character, mantra-like repetitions, narrow tessitura chanting and ritual word-tone archaisms (‘woyra, woyra, woriyrariy!’) are distinctly at odds with the performance styles of today (they are best heard in traditional Adyge villages such as Shovgenovsk). Under their charismatic leader Rosa Chamagua, Gunda favours instead a heavily folklorized performance style, in the manner of the ensembles that once paraded their wares at festivals and competitions all over Soviet and Soviet-controlled territories. Yet it was still obvious to me that this music was much closer to Circassian than to Georgian traditions. And again I was reminded of the performances I had heard in the Circassian communities of Anatolia.[8]

Which brings me at last to Turkey. In the early evening of 22 May last year I joined several hundred Abkhazians and Circassians in the Turkish city Kayseri for their annual ‘genocide day’ commemoration (the day itself is actually 21 May). The genocide in question (though there are the usual queries about the term) took place in the mid 1860s, with 1864 as the key date. In the wake of a comprehensive defeat of the legendary Dagestani warrior Imam Shamyl in 1859, Russia engaged in a campaign of destruction and deportation, marking a definitive stage in its conquest of the Caucasus. At this point vast numbers of Circassians were exiled to Anatolia, and Abkhaz Muslims were expelled shortly after. The preservation and subsequent reconstruction of their cultural identities in the Ottoman world was a long, arduous and defensive process. But it was driven throughout by a powerful sense of that original injustice. The imperative was to counter the injustice through the reconstitution of an ethnic memory. Preserving the culture – the cultural nation – was a political enterprise from the start.

The events in Kayseri began with an organized walk. We made our way northwards along Mustafa Kemal Paşa Bulvarı, and then, describing a kind of extended arc, into Ayvacık Caddesi until finally we arrived at the Kadir Has Kongre Merkezi ve Spor Kompleksi for the formal part of the ceremony. Distinctive green Circassian flags were held aloft during the walk, along with innumerable placards, some referring to the genocide itself, others calling for a wider international recognition of Abkhazia. The mood was festive and good-humoured, and it was soon clear that this is a tight-knit community, one where people know each other well. At the main auditorium the events of the 1860s were evoked through a lengthy representational sequence, involving old photographs, film, dance, music, poetry and mime, all clearly designed to draw together the public and private dimensions of the massacres and the subsequent expulsion, in the course of which many more died. The more monumental aspects of the history were certainly on display, but there were also vignettes depicting the impact of these events on domestic life. It was an impressive programme, and it became genuinely moving at the end, when the Imam gave a final benediction in the mother tongue, long banned from the mosques of Turkey. At this point, among the older generation, tissues began to make discreet appearances.

In considering the Circassian narrative it is hard not to be struck by the parallel with Armenians in diaspora, albeit with oppressors (Turkey and Russia) and faiths (Christian and Muslim) standing in something like an inverse relation. There are similar stories to tell about the nation-defining role of the genocides, especially in light of non-recognition by respective perpetrators, about the ambivalence that attaches itself to concepts of home(s) and of return (more recently, the Internet has transformed this latter concept), about the key roles of language and music in validating the diasporic nation, about the ‘second generation’ effect beloved of exile studies more generally, and about an internal east-west division – with associated dialects – within the respective national communities. Even the outsider characterization of femininity constitutes a shared narrative. Naturally there are differences. Despite their best efforts, Circassians in diaspora arguably lost the battle for language, and partly for this reason music and dance have assumed primary significance in defining their culture, albeit in a homogenized form that can rather easily fall prey to exoticist readings by host communities. In comparison, as Sylvia Angelique Alajaji makes clear, the Armenians, and especially the Lebanese Armenians, secured the language and quickly harnessed it to the national cause.[9] Another crucial difference is that the entire world knows about the Armenian genocide, while the Circassian story struggles to be heard, as does, incidentally, the story of the Crimean Tatars, to cite another viable comparator. There is an asymmetry of visibility, and we may well ask why.

The significance of Kayseri for the Circassians is that it is placed strategically on one of two rather distinct lines of migration across Anatolia followed by the original Circassian settlers. The western line, taken by those who landed at the port of Kefken, near Düzce, crosses to Bursa, and proceeds from there down through Karıncalı and Manisa to Izmir on the Aegean coast (there are Circassian writings on the walls of a large cave near Kefken where many of the refugees initially sheltered). The eastern line begins at the ports of either Trabzon or Samsun (in some cases also Sinope) and takes in Sivas and Kayseri before making its way down through Kahramanmaraş and Hatay to Israel, Jordan and Syria. Circassian communities can be found at various points along these two lines of travel. Needless-to-say, this is a somewhat oversimplified mapping. There was in reality a much wider dispersal, and in numerous cases there was secondary displacement and renewed settlement. But the model does have some explanatory value when we look at the geography of the diaspora in Turkey today. The Western line was made up mainly of western Circassians, including Abazins and Ubyks, while the eastern line was mainly Kabardians. There are significantly different musical idioms between these two groups – indeed there is a preference for dance in the eastern line and for music in the western – but I will pass over that here.

By any account, Kayseri is of central significance for Circassians. The present-day Circassian population of the city was initially based in around seventy villages in the nearby district of Uzunyayla, with the process of settlement intensified following the Russo-Circassian war of 1763-1864. The layout of Uzunyayla, and in particular the names of its villages and streets, has been examined in a project on ‘landscapes of memory’ by Eiji Miyazawa, focusing especially on how changes in the names spelt out changing connections between the ancestral homeland and the adopted homeland.[10] Miyazawa documents the on-going defensive struggle to maintain an ethnic identity, a process he regards as both heavily contested within the community and of its nature incomplete. Yet, however much a separate Circassian identity may have been subject to internal dissension and the politics of envy in this and other relatively closed communities (bearing in mind the tribal diversity of these peoples), it was preserved in a relatively stable state in the late nineteenth century, and for much of the subsequent history of the diaspora. This did not preclude Circassians achieving distinction within the ranks of the Ottoman administration and military, but it did mean relatively little intermarriage with the Turks, and even a form of Islam that was essentially different from Ottoman traditions (many of the Imams had studied in Egypt). The Uzunyayla villages in particular were insulated from their immediate surroundings. Aside from living ‘in khabze’ (a ubiquitous, if untranslatable, Kabardian word embracing traditional values and customs, codes of etiquette, property and inheritance, and the pedigreed practices of hospitality and of everyday social life), their population, including the younger generation, spoke the mother tongue, even when they became Turkish citizens with the establishment of the Republic (which limited their language rights), and this remained the case until the 1980s.

At this point things began to change, partly because of a renewed Turkification of both schools and mosques, and partly because, under the more general imperatives of modernity, Circassians from the villages began to drift towards the cities, with a consequent weakening of the oral tradition, and increasing intermarriage with the Turks. Today the villages of Uzunyayla are largely depleted, and it is only in summer that people return there to tend their plots. It is generally considered that the move to the cities (Ankara as well as Kayseri) was hugely detrimental to a strong sense of Circassian identity, mainly because the younger generation developed more and more points of contact with their coevals in the Turkish community. In the terms adopted by some critical theorists, genealogical thinking (the ways of the fathers) began to yield to a form of generational (or cohort) thinking associated with a shared, and increasingly global, youth culture.[11] Ironically enough, this tendency was reinforced by the pedigreed separation of the generations in traditional Circassian society; even in modern households today, it is deemed inappropriate for a daughter-in-law to initiate conversation with the man of the house, for example.

This opening out to Turkey has continued apace, but after the break up of the Soviet Union, there has also been a contrary process, as Circassians have simultaneously closed in on themselves, renewing their culture, re-investing in its traditions, and re-forging a sense of national identity in defiance of assimilationist tendencies and policies of Turkification. The process was facilitated by easier travel to Sukhum, Maykop and Nalchik, by the renewed possibility of direct dialogue between the ancestral homeland and diasporic communities, and – as recently as 2013 – by the government’s eventual acceptance of Abkhaz and Adygean as official minority languages (it should be stressed that even those younger people to whom the language is lost can preserve a cultural identity through investment in khabze). This cultural renewal was no longer a matter of preservation but of reconstruction, and the prime movers in the reconstruction were the Circassian Associations. The associations were really products of the migration of Circassian populations to the cities, and they effectively set out to recreate the villages within the cities by re-vivifying the culture, albeit in a newly homogenized form. There are more than sixty such associations in Turkey today, networked through the Federation of Circassian Associations in Istanbul and the International Circassian Association in Nalchik.

The Association movement began with a single dernek (association building) in the early twentieth century, but it mushroomed in the post World War II era, albeit facing a difficult period following the 1980 coup d’état. Today the associations function in part as social gathering places, with young people spending much of their free time in the cafés and restaurants of the dernek, all serving traditional Circassian food, notably the distinctive ravioli-like çerkez mantısı, filled with either potato or meat and served with ‘red sauce’. Kids grow up in the shadow of the dernek and develop many of their early friendships there. But the associations further provide platforms for ethno-cultural debate, and they have often been linked with political radicalism, to the extent that Circassians from the villages sometimes look on them with disapproval. They are also centres of education, offering language classes and employing teachers from the Caucasus to give lessons in music and (especially) dance.

The double process I have described here – opening out and closing in – is mirrored rather precisely by the fates of language and music respectively. Thanks to the opening out, many young Circassians no longer speak the language. And precisely because this crucial identifier is now widely considered a lost cause, music and dance have become correspondingly more important in reconstructing the culture. That represents the closing in. The derneks I visited in Kayseri and Ankara each had a large hall with a wall-length mirror, specifically for the dance classes that take place every weekend. Since the early 1990s, it has been customary to bring (and to pay) professional teachers from institutes and colleges in the North Caucasus to instruct the children and to work with the local ensembles. Accordingly the level is high (professional standard), and the ensembles in both cities give regular public performances. While in Kayseri I watched classes given to around forty children under twelve and also attended rehearsals by the dance ensemble Ashemez (another Nart character), accompanied by members of the music group Maze, whose leader, Kayhan Demirci , is an Abkhazian. Likewise in Ankara I caught a full-dress rehearsal for a public performance to be given by junior members of the resident ensemble Badin, led by Şamil Dinçer. The costumes are worn with pride, bearing in mind that until 2008 the cherkessa was technically banned under the Turkish ‘hat law’.

To watch these rehearsals is to witness up close just why this highly stylized model of folklore (positively balletic in its poise, elegance and artistry) can function so effectively as a means of reconstructing a cultural identity. It homogenizes team behaviour, unifies group ideologies, encourages pride in the group, demands commitment, and promotes a work ethic. These dance ensembles, with their elaborate choreography, conformant costumes and routines of rehearsal, constitute structures of sociability and solidarity. They work to affirm and reinforce the attitudes and prejudices associated with Circassian identity, and at the same time they bolster resistance to any undermining of that identity by assimilationist pressures. And it all starts young. Small children have little investment in the cause, and as any advertising agent knows, the lower the investment in the product, the more effective the propaganda. And by the way, there is a further consequence of this strengthened collective identity. It renders the group an easy target for exoticist agendas on the part of the host community. Several Turkish acquaintances of mine told me how much they enjoy these full-costume dance performances, just as they appreciate Circassian food, and the fair complexions of the (mythically beautiful) Circassian women.

The performances I witnessed in Kayseri and Ankara were polished and professional. They were highly formalized, mixing line and (open) circle dances with couple dances, but also allowing for bravura male solos, notably en pointe (Adygean “lheperischw”). Gender separation was instantly apparent, with the positioning of the woman at once symbolic of domestic centrality and modesty, and suggestive of a traditional obligation on men to protect the women. In Kayseri I saw mannered depictions of several stages of the wedding ceremony, including the procession of the bride as she is escorted to her new home and the “Niseyiish” dance, where she is welcomed by her future inlaws. In Ankara I observed the stately Knight’s dance “Qafe”, the fast tempo “Shishan”, and numerous versions of the ritual dance “Wuig”, some performed as circle dances, others as couple dances. In all cases, the accompaniments, lively if unvaried, were provided by the familiar duo of Pshina (accordion) and Pxachich (clappers), but with the occasional addition of a Shik'epshine  (similar to a kemençe) in Kayseri, and with energetic input from the Doul (frame drum) of Şamil Dinçer in Ankara. There was a frisson when Auledin Dumanish, one-time director of the Nalchik state ensemble Kabardinka, visited the dernek in Kayseri on the Sunday afternoon following genocide day and briefly participated in the dancing.

It is obvious that these performances have little to do with the traditional wored-s (songs) of the “long-lived” men of Circassia, however much lip service may be paid to the values of that primary practice. As in Georgia, there existed in Abkhazia and the Circassian lands a rich tradition of music connected to everyday life, including work songs, ceremonial songs (especially hunting songs), lullabies and laments, with the latter two traditionally the preserve of women. Mostly these songs were monophonic, but some were traditionally sung in two- or three-part polyphony, and even the monophonic songs often have either a vocal refrain in parallel fourths or fifths or a multi-part instrumental accompaniment. Here we might note that while North Caucasian polyphonies remained distinct in idiom from Georgian counterparts, Abkhazia had points of contact with both. Of the various northern traditions it was proximate to ancient Ossetian styles in particular, for reasons that are not entirely clear, but there were also, predictably enough given the geopolitics of the region, shared characteristics with Mingrelian idioms that are today considered Georgian (Mingrelia was part of the medieval Abkhaz Kingdom). Short-breathed phrases, a high level of repetition and a background pulse often articulated by clappers are characteristic. In addition to these repertories of ritual song, there were epic songs referencing Abkhaz and Circassian histories, often performed as stridently recited poetry with semi-improvised accompaniment. These songs are a reminder of a bardic tradition that was once widespread across the Caucasus, inviting comparison with epic traditions both to the north (Russia) and to the south (Turkey).[12]

Again as in Georgia, it is hard to pinpoint a starting point for the folklorization of Abkhaz-Adygean traditional music, given that from an early stage music was associated with particular families (in Abkhazia) and villages (in both Abkhazia and Adygea), which established and maintained a reputation for excellence. In other words, an ethos of professionalism had deep historical roots in these lands. But in the early twentieth century there was something of a step change, and this included the emergence of a star system, with legendary singers and instrumentalists beginning to appear, some of them leaving a recorded legacy. Soviet ideology played its customary role in this, of course, but it was by no means a sole cause. What it guaranteed was that a distinctive folklore movement appeared some time before such movements became commonplace, indeed all but universal, in the aftermath of World War II. And it had one other effect. The hierarchy of values created by folklore – everyday singers, professional singers – ensured that right from the start there was an ambiguity at the heart of the collecting process in the sense that collectors invariably sought out the best singers.

Undoubtedly the stylized performances of the Circassian ensembles in Turkey owe a great deal to this earlier folklore movement, which followed much the same pattern in the Abkhaz-Adygean lands as elsewhere in the Soviet Union. A professional or semi-professional genre of “folk music” was constructed on the ground of a traditional musical culture that was simultaneously made the subject of extensive collection and intensive study, and all informed by a mixture of ideologically driven and genuinely disinterested (scholarly) motives. The tasks in the Soviet Union were threefold: to map out regional musics on a systematic basis, to arrive at theoretical principles for the description and classification of those musics, and to render traditional music applicable to the modern urban world, which meant creating new institutions to support it. Of the three, it is the last that has informed the movement in Turkey, and especially in respect of dance. It is noteworthy that the choreographing and training of the dance groups in the North Caucasus often involved practitioners from long-established Russian traditions of classical ballet, and the results were transmitted in turn to the ensembles in Turkey. In short, the song and dance ensembles might best be considered simulacra, rather as Jean Baudrillard understood this term. They simulated a reality that was not (or was no longer) there, gathering a cluster of separate elements into a largely synthetic whole.[13]

Inevitably, there has been a further layer of modernization in more recent years. Traditional instruments are still used, but not exclusively. A modern clarinet appeared at one concert I attended in Kayseri, as well as an electric bass guitar. And as the latter instrument suggests, there is a similar fluidity as to style. Circassian ethno-pop is now a recognized genre (with notable stars such as the Canadian-Circassian singer Aslan Gotov and the well-known chanteuse Svetlana Kushu), and it is not uncommon for Circassian concerts to host star singers and accordionists with synthesized backing in which the clappers have been replaced by the familiar reproduction drum kit. Provided the music is recognizably an emblem, a badge, of Circassian identity – and the ubiquity of a specific accordion style is key here – many genres are possible, and may even be juxtaposed at a single event. One Turkish doctoral student at Erciyes University described to me a so-called Uzunyayla Fellowship Night in Kayseri, in which a music and dance ensemble from Ankara shared the platform with a well-known Circassian pop singer. And in an interesting twist on the politics of language, the singer included some Turkish popular songs in Circassian translation.

My final remarks are about return. For long enough the native soil – the idea of it – exerted a powerful influence in absentia on Turkish Circassians, with children encouraged to ‘turn their faces towards the Caucasus’ from the earliest age. But the reality of a Caucasian homeland, known only to their distant ancestors, remained inaccessible. Then, with the break-up of the Soviet Union, this too began to change. Again the associations were instrumental, acting as important channels to the ancestral homeland, working as facilitators for the repatriation committees, arranging cultural exchanges and excursions, and hosting visiting academics and tour groups from Nalchik or Maykop. Initially membership of a music or dance ensemble was one of the easiest and most practical ways for young people to visit both the North Caucasus and Abkhazia. These early returns had something of a pilgrimage character (the Mecca analogy was often made). They were testing grounds for the matching up of image and reality, and as such they were invariably highly charged emotionally. But they also provided opportunities for cultural transfer, and in both directions. The familiar exilic trope of cultures preserved in diaspora and then transferred back to the homeland was active here too.

It is now common enough for Circassians in Turkey to return to the Caucasus. But, as Jade Cemre Erciyes notes in an admirable study, return can mean many things.[14] There is a spectrum: occasional visits, ‘virtual return’ through the Internet, a transnational vie bifurquée (involving a hybrid identity), and finally full settlement, though there are obstacles of different qualities – legal, bureaucratic, political and emotional – to full settlement. Making choices is by no means straightforward, not least because there are certain essential differences between the profiles of home and diaspora communities, mainly concerning the role and importance of Islam. Very broadly, religion is a much more fundamental dimension of Circassian identity in Turkey, at least for older and middle generations, than in the Caucasus (as I saw for myself, the Imam is a figure of veneration in the associations). One informant told me that he was in the habit of telling people in Nalchik that they needed to learn from the diaspora in this respect (‘they are all atheists there’), just as the diaspora Circassians could learn more about the particularities of Adigag (which incorporates khabze and is virtually a religion in itself) from Maykop and Nalchik. Such differences can prove unsettling – sometimes literally so – for those who travel in either direction. There are generational differences, too, though I will pass over those. And there is reverse nostalgia, of a kind I have also encountered among returnees in other cultures, including the Crimean Tatars.

What I think potentially emerges from these reflections is a sermon on culture and nation. One obvious inference is that culture and nation are functioning here in counterpoint. But counterpoint is not the same as opposition. To be synoptic, I propose that nations are not only political, and that cultures are also political. The stories of the Georgian borderlands and the Circassian migrations have in common politically motivated appropriations of culture. In the Georgian borderlands such appropriations were initially external to the practice. But practitioners themselves can be rather easily converted, and when that happens the propaganda becomes self-propaganda, blissfully indifferent to any contradiction between what is claimed and what is truly believed (there really are nuances in all this). In the case of the Circassian diaspora it was self-propaganda from the start, and non-practitioners more often than not either ignored or misread the signals. I am quite unable to resist adding that according to Wikipedia, whose virtues were recently extolled by John Julius Norwich in an issue of The Times, self-propaganda can be a form of self-deception.[15]

 

[1] Anzor Erkamaishvili, Director of the Rustavi Ensemble and Head of the International Centre for Georgian Folk Song, was in large measure responsible for preparing the ‘Chakrulo’ submission to UNESCO in 2001.

[2] As of today there are seven volumes of proceedings, all published by the Centre for Traditional Polyphony.

[3] Already in the 1860s, the mountaineer and geographer Douglas Freshfield was struck by the distinctive singing of the Svanetians, and urged the collection of their ballads. See D. Freshfield, Travels in the Central Caucasus and Bashan including Visits to Ararat and Tabreez and Ascents of Kazbek and Elbruz (London: Longman, Green and Co, 1869), vol. 1, 219.

[4] See, for example, the essay by Shalva Aslanishvili in R. Tsurtsumia and J. Jordania (eds), Echoes from Georgia: Seventeen Arguments on Georgian Polyphony (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2010).

[5] Several students of traditional polyphony argue that the term ‘polyphony’ is inadequate for this kind of homorhythmic style. See, in the context of Russian traditional polyphonies, contributions to Les polyphonies populaires russes: actes du colloque de Royaumont (Paris: Éditions Créaphis, 1991).

[6] V. Nitsiakos and C. Mantzos, ‘Negotiating Culture: Political Uses of Polyphonic Folk Songs in Greece and Albania’, in D. Tsiovas (ed.), Greece and the Balkans: Identities, Perceptions and Cultural Encounters since the Enlightenment (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 192-207.

[7] The major anthology in English is J. Colarosso (ed. and trans.), Nart Sagas from the Caucasus: Myths and Legends from the Circassians, Abazaa, Abkhaz, and Ubyks (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003).

[8] The major studies of Abkhazian music are in the Russian language. They include, М. М.  Xaшба, Народная Музыка Абхазов: Жанры, Стилистика, Кросс-Куллтурные Параллели [The National Music of Abkhazia: Genres, Styles and Cross-Cultural Parallels] (Sukhum: Abkhazian Academy of Sciences, 2007) and Д. А. Чурей, Из Пессено-Инструментальной Традиции Абхазов [From the Vocal-Instrumental Traditions of Abkhazia] (Sukhum: Abkhazian Academy of Sciences, 2014).

[9] S. A. Alajaji, Music and the Armenian Diaspora: Searching for Home in Exile (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015).

[10] E. Miyazawa, Memory Politics: Circassians of Uzunyayla, Turkey. PhD Diss., School of Oriental and African Studies (London, 2004).

[11] S. Lovell, ‘From Genealogy to Generation: The Birth of Cohort Thinking in Russia’. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 9/3 (2008), 567-94.

[12] Н. Д. Чанба, Героическая Хоровая Песния Абхаэов [Heroic Choral Songs of Abkhazians] (Sukhum: Abgiz, 2014). On the Russian tradition, see I. F. Hapgood, The Epic Songs of Russia (London; Constable & Co, 1915), N. Kershaw Chadwick, Russian Heroic Poetry (New York; Russell & Russell, 1964 [1932]), and J. Bailey and T. Ivanova, An Anthology of Russian Folk Epics (New York and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1998). On the Turkish Ashik tradition (though not exclusively focusing on epics), see Y. Erdener, The Song Contests of Turkish Minstrels: Improvised Poetry Sung to Traditional Music (New York and London: Garland, 1995) and N. Kononenko Moyle, The Turkish Minstrel Tale Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). More generally, see K. Reichl (ed), The Oral Epic: Performance and Music (Berlin: Verlag für Wiss. und Bildung, 2000), and on the Balkans, see P. Bohlman and N. Petković (eds.), Balkan Epic: Songs, History, Modernity (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2011). 

[13] J. Baudrillard, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’, in Selected Writings (Cambridge: Polity, 1988 [1981]), 169-87.

[14] J. C. Erciyes, Return Migration to the Caucasus: The Adyge-Abkhaz Diaspora(s), Transnationalism and Life after Return. PhD Diss., University of Sussex (Brighton, 2014).

[15] J. J. Norwich, ‘All hail Wikipedia’, letter to The Times (14 June 2015).

Gábor Bálint de Szentkatolna (1844-1913) and the Study of Kabardian, by László Marácz
The Zichy expedition in the Caucasus
  • Linguistics
Gábor Bálint de Szentkatolna (1844-1913) and the Study of Kabardian, by László Marácz

From the book Exploring the Caucasus in the 21st Century: Essays on Culture, History and Politics in a Dynamic Context, Edited by Francoise Companjen, Laszlo Maracz, and Lia Versteegh is published by Amsterdam University Press. [Chapter 1].

The article in PDF can be downloaded by clicking here.

Prof. Dr. László Marácz (University of Amsterdam, Eurasian National University, Astana)

Gábor Bálint de Szentkatolna was one of the most talented Hungarian linguists of the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. He devoted his life to the study of the so-called ‘Turanian’ languages, i.e. the hypothesized language family of Uralic, Altaic and Dravidian languages. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the languages of the Caucasus were also considered to be scattered members of this  language family. This Hungarian linguist wrote a number of grammars and dictionaries of these languages.

Bálint de Szentkatolna also wrote a grammar and a dictionary of the Western Caucasian language, Kabardian, which he thought to be closely related to Hungarian. The Kabardian language is presently spoken by 443.000 persons in Russia, who live in the Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachai-Cherkessia native territories. The capital of these territories is Naltshik. The other speakers of Kabardian, more than one million of them, can be found in Turkey and in the Middle East. The fact that half of the Kabardian population has left its Northern Caucasian homeland is due to Russian colonial policy, starting in the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Kabardian is generally considered to be a rather difficult language, and its sound system, especially, is rather complicated. The language counts 56 sounds, having only a few vowels. The set of consonants includes rare fricatives and affricatives, like the ejective ones displaying a clear phonemic distinction. Kabardian is closely related to Adyghe that is spoken by 125.000 people in Russia, in the Northern Caucasian Adygean Republic, of which Maikop is the capital.

Most linguists, including Bálint de Szentkatolna, claimed that Adyghe and Kabardian are only dialectical variants of Circassian.[1] In the prefaces of  his Kabardian grammar and dictionary, the terms Adyghe, Circassian and Kabardian are used as alternates. The term Adyghe actually functions as a kind of super-category covering Cirkassian and Kabardian.[2] According to the Russian scholar, Klimov, (1969, 135) the Adyghe-Circassian-Kabardian language is formed with Abkhaz and Ubyx that are no longer spoken in the Western Caucasian language group. The Western Caucasian languages are related to the Eastern Caucasian languages, including Avar, Chechen and Ingush, yielding the family of Northern Caucasian languages.[3]

In this paper, we will address the question of how a Hungarian linguist became interested in the study of a complicated Caucasian language like Kabardian. It will be argued that this was due to three reasons. Firstly,  Bálint de Szentkatolna was of Székely stock. The Székely is an ethnic Hungarian group living in the southern region of Transylvania, the so-called Székelyland at the foot of the Eastern Carpathians. Transylvania belongs presently to Romania but, before the First World War, it was under the suzerainty of the Hungarian Kingdom. Secondly, Bálint de Szentkatolna was a member of the Zichy-expedition to the Caucasus, in 1895, visiting the territories where Kabardian was still spoken. Thirdly, the Székely linguist was convinced of the fact that the so-called Turanian languages, including Kabardian, were related.[4] Finally, we will evaluate Bálint de Szentkatolna’s study of the Kabardian language.

The Székely heritage

The Székely, Gábor Bálint de Szentkatolnai, was born on March 13, 1844, to Endre Bálint and Ágnes Illyés, in the village of Szentkatolna, in the County of Háromszék, which was one of the Székely counties of the Hungarian Kingdom. Szentkatolna was a typical Székely village in the so-called Székelyland in the southern part of Transylvania. The Székely were border-guards in the old Hungarian Kingdom, protecting the south-eastern borders, i.e. the mountain range of the Eastern Carpathians. Because of this, most of the Székely were granted nobility by the Hungarians kings or rulers of the semi-independent Transylvanian principality that existed in the seventeenth century, during the Ottoman occupation of Hungary.[5] The ancestors of Gábor Bálint had been granted nobility as well. They received nobility from the Habsburg King of Hungary, Rudolf (1572-1608) and it was reinforced by Prince Gábor Rákóczy I of Transylvania (1630-1648). The Bálint family originally lived in the neighbouring village of Lemhény. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, one of their branches moved to Szentkatolna. Hence, instead of referring to Lemhény in their noble title, the branch, to which Gábor Bálint belonged, used the Hungarian style notation Szentkatolnai meaning ‘from Szentkatolna’ or the French style notation with de, i.e. ‘De Szentkatolna’ for international use expressing nobility.[6]

The Székely nobility has always been a group among the Hungarians, who have a  strong awareness of their Hungarian identity. The Székely military played an important role in the Hungarian Revolution and War of Independence of 1848-1849 against the Austrian absolutism of the Habsburgs. Gábor Bálint de Szenkatolna’s father also joined the Hungarian honvéd ’army’, established by the leader of the Hungarian War of Independence, Lajos Kossuth, in order to fight the Austrian troops and, later in 1849, the Czarist Russian troops that came to the support of the Austrian Emperor, Franz Jozef. The inhabitants of the village of Szentkatolna, just like other Hungarians, were punished severely for their rebellion against the Austrians and the House of Habsburg. The village had to accept the burden of the presence of the Russian soldiers and their horses.[7] Because the Hungarian Revolution and the War of Independence was crushed brutally by the Austrians, the Hungarians took an anti-Austro-German stance in the second half of the nineteenth century, although politically the Austrian and Hungarian conflict was pacified by the Augleich (Compromise) of 1867, when the Austrians recognized Hungary as equal to Austria, within the framework of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy. Hence, little Gábor, who was four years-old at the beginning of the Hungarian Revolution in 1848, grew up in an anti-Austro-German atmosphere in a humiliated Hungary, where the Hungarian defeat at the hands of the Austrians and the Russians was remembered bitterly. Another important feature of the Székely-Hungarian heritage was the legendary remembrance of the Orientalist, Sándor Csoma de Kőrös (1784-1842), who tried to solve the puzzle of the Hungarian Urheimat in Central Asia.

Bálint de Szentkatolna was born only shortly after one of the most celebrated fellow Székely heroes of his time, Sándor Csoma de Kőrös, died in 1842, in far away Darjeeling.[8] The remembrance of the Székely Orientalist must have been especially strong in the Székelyland, where Csoma de Kőrös was born. His birth village was actually quite close to Szentkatolna, Gábor’s birthplace. Szentkatolna is only twenty kilometres away from Kőrös, both villages lying in the County of Háromszék.[9] Sándor Csoma de Kőrös had studied Orientalism at the University of Göttingen in Germany, and left for Central Asia in 1821 to search for the ancient Hungarian homeland. Csoma de Kőrös, like most of his contemporary Hungarians, was convinced of the fact that the Hungarians were descendants of the Huns and that their ancient homeland must have been somewhere in Central Asia. The belief in the Hunnic origin of the Hungarians is especially strong among the Székely. In their legends and folklore, the Székely are considered to be one of the peoples that succeeded the Huns and who settled, under the leadership of their Prince Csaba, in the southern parts of Transylvania, after the collapse of the Hunnic Empire of Attila.

Csoma de Kőrös arrived on July, 16 1822 in Kashmir, where he met William Moorcroft, an official of the British East India Company. It was William Moorcroft, who foresaw a struggle between  Britain and Russia for influence in Central Asia, the so-called Great Game.[10] It was the same William Moorcraft, who put the Székely-Hungarian scholar on the track of Tibetan studies, offering him a scholarship from the Royal Asiatic Society to study the Tibetan language and culture. When Csoma de Kőrös died in 1842, in Darjeeling, on his way to the capital of Tibet, Lhasa, it was a complete mystery what he had discovered about the ancient Hungarian homeland in the libraries of the Tibetan monasteries. In any case,  a side-effect of his quest for the ancient Hungarian homeland would turn out to be his greatest achievement, namely the publication of a Tibetan grammar and dictionary.                 

A number of myths, legends and rumours started to spread about Sándor Csoma de Kőrös in his native country, Hungary, after his unfortunate death. These stories had an enormous appeal to the fantasy of young Hungarians. A scholar without any real help, suffering from poverty and tough climate in the Himalayas, had sacrificed his life to solve the puzzle of the origins of Hungarians. The remembrance of Csoma de Kőrös must have had a great appeal also to the young Gábor, a fellow Székely from a neighbouring village. In fact, Bálint de Szentkatolna would soon become one of the most important successors of the Central Asian traveller Sándor Csoma de Kőrös. 

‘The Ugor-Turkish War’

Although the Bálint family was of noble origin, this did not guarantee a wealthy life. Gábor grew up under poor circumstances. After his elementary school years at several schools in his native Székelyland and Transylvania, he took his final examinations at the Catholic Lyceum in Nagyvárad.[11] When he graduated from the Catholic Lyceum, he already knew a dozen European and Oriental languages, including the classical languages. Gábor had a special talent for mastering new languages quickly and, in the years to come, he would acquire some thirty languages, including Esperanto. After his final examinations, Gábor continued his studies at the Faculty of Law at the University of Vienna. The young student also took classes in Oriental Studies and Languages. Because Gábor ran out of money, he decided to finish his law and linguistic studies at the University of Pest. The young Székely graduated from the Hungarian university in 1871. Shortly afterwards, he became acquainted with two other scholars, who were active in Budapest, namely János Fogarasi (1801-1878) and Ármin Vámbéry (1832-1913). These two men had an important influence on his future career.

János Fogarasi was a judge at the High Court of Justice and a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. After his co-editor, Gergely Czuczor died in 1866, he continued to compile the Great Dictionary of the Academy of Sciences alone. This dictionary was the first scientific dictionary of the Hungarian language, organizing the Hungarian vocabulary in terms of the root, i.e. the minimal linguistic entity that has a recognizable phonetic form and semantic identity without suffixes. The co-editor of the Great Dictionary, Gergely Czuczor, was a monk of the Benedictine Order, who wrote romantic poems and, because of his anti-Austrian activities during the 1848-1849 Freedom Fight, he was incarcerated in the prison of Kufstein.[12] A military court, under the leadership of Austrian General Alfred von Windischgrätz, sentenced Czuczor to six years imprisonment in chains because of his poem, Riadó ‘Alarm’, in which he called for the Hungarians to take up arms against Austrian tyranny.[13]

After the defeat of the Hungarian honvéd in 1849, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, established by the liberal Count István Széchenyi, became Germanized in the anti-Hungarian era under the Austrian governor Alexander Bach. In the Bach era that lasted until the Ausgleich of 1867, a scholar, loyal to the Austrian cause, Paul Hunsdorfer, a lawyer belonging to the German minority of Upper-Hungary and a representative of the Peace Party in the Hungarian Parliament, which wanted to compromise with the House of Habsburg, became one of the leading scholars at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Hunsdorfer, who Magyarized his name into Pál Hunfalvy, was appointed chief librarian of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1851. The Great Dictionary of the Academy of Sciences, also referred to as the  Czuczor-Fogarasi dictionary, which was finished in 1874, was heavily attacked by Pál Hunfalvy. Hunfalvy, who claimed that the dictionary was based on false premises, could however not prevent its publication.[14] 

The other scholar, who played an important role in Bálint de Szentkatolna’s further scientific career, was the Orientalist, Ármin Vámbéry. Vámbéry was a traveller to Central Asia and he lectured in Turkish at the University of Pest. Although Hunfalvy designated the Finnish language as the most influential in the research of Hungarian language relationships already in 1861, Vámbéry kept advocating the genetic relationship between Hungarian and the Turkish-Mongolian languages, especially from 1870 on, when he published his study on ‘Hungarian and Turkish-Tatar Cognates’.[15] In order to prove that the Hungarian language was genetically related to Finnish, Hunfalvy invited the German linguist, Jozef Budenz (1836-1892), educated at the University of Göttingen, to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Budenz was however not successful in applying the methods of comparative Indo-Germanic linguistics to Hungarian and Finnish. He at first even thought that Hungarian was related to Turkish.[16]

The debate between the two camps, on the one hand, the supporters of the Finnish and, on the other hand, the Turkish relationship to Hungarian, was called the ‘Ugor-Turkish War’.[17] In fact, the term ‘war’ is not as obscure as it seems at first sight because it was actually a continuation of the Hungarian-Austro-German political and military clash of 1848-1849. The ‘battlefield’ was this time not Hungary but the Hungarian identity, i.e. the quest for the origins of the Hungarians and their language. The German camp, including Hunfalvy and Budenz, pushed the Nordic relationship of the Hungarians; the Hungarian camp, including Fogarasi and Vámbéry, looked to the south for Hungarian relatives. Since the southern option was closer to the cradle of human culture and civilization than the Nordic one, it was favoured by the Hungarian camp and disliked by the German camp. Bálint de Szentkatolna joined – how could he do anything else as a Székely - the Hungarian camp. The Székely scholar was of the opinion that it was unacceptable for Germans, like Hunfalvy and Budenz to head the Department of Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and decide on the origin of the Hungarian language.[18] In 1871, Vámbéry urged Bálint de Szentkatolna to study the Central Asian language affinities, i.e. Mongolian, Tatar, Chinese, to the Hungarian language in situ. Fogarasi advised him to take up Mongolian and Russian.[19]     

In isolation

Between 1871 and 1874, Bálint de Szentkatolna travelled to Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia to study the so-called Turanian languages. This field trip was sponsored by János Fogarasi, who gave the Székely scholar 100 golden forints. The amount was doubled by József von Eötvös, the Hungarian Minister of Culture and Education after the Ausgleich. In those years, Bálint de Szentkatolna also visited Kazan and the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences to collect Turkish, Tatar and Mongolian language material. When he arrived back in Hungary in 1874, the Academy of Sciences offered the Székely linguist a monthly salary of 500 forints only, half of the salary of a young university teacher. Because of this, Gábor found it difficult to pay his expenses. His difficult financial situation hindered the elaboration of the enormous files of language material Bálint de Szentkatolna had collected in Russia and Central Asia. It was, however, not by accident that his financial existence was kept uncertain by the Academy of Sciences. By then, Hunfalvy and Budenz had already gained full control over the positions within the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and they were not interested in a scholar arguing for a Hungarian language relationship with Oriental languages, like Turkish or Mongolian. Budenz must have felt personally offended by Bálint de Szentkatolna because the Székely linguist questioned Budenz’ study of Cheremiss. Gábor, who had checked Budenz’ Cheremiss language study, on his request, with Cheremiss informants in situ, was not able to make anything out of it, because Budenz had mixed up two dialects of Cheremiss.[20] In 1877-1878, Bálint de Szentkatolna again travelled to Eastern Asia, this time as a member of the expedition organized by Count Béla Széchenyi, the son of Count István Széchenyi. During this expedition, Bálint de Szentkatolna focussed on his Dravidian and Tamil studies.[21]

In his 1877 study, ‘Parallels in the Field of the Hungarian and Mongolian Languages’, Bálint de Szentkatolna argued that Hungarian is an independent branch within the family of Turanian languages and cannot be derived from a non-existent Finno-Ugrian Ursprache. According to the Székely linguist, there is a genetic relationship between Hungarian and Mongolian, and  Mongolian is closer to Hungarian than Finnish.[22] In his ‘Parallels (…)’, Bálint de Szentkatolna strongly criticizes Pál Hunfalvy for trying to reconstruct the Hungarian Urgeschichte on the basis of linguistic affinities only.[23] Hunfalvy and Budenz were embarrassed by the Székely linguist and he became their most important opponent to be marginalized definitively.[24] After the death of his protector, János Fogarasi, in 1878, Hunfalvy and Budenz kept Bálint de Szentkatolna away from Vámbéry, who already had a teaching position at the University of Budapest. Finally Bálint de Szentkatolna tired of the  machinations of his enemies and decided to leave his beloved Hungary:‘ For me there was no position at the University, at the Academy, at the ministries, or at some foreign embassy, while others, who hardly did anything for Science, were given old and newly established positions with a good income.’[25] The conflict between Bálint de Szentkatolna and Hunfalvy and Budenz inspired the national poet, János Arany (1817-1882), who was, between 1870 and 1879, Secretary of the Academy of Sciences, to write the following epigrams in 1878:

To Budenz. Bálint is a really iron-headed Székely,

Who does not go, where Pál Hunfalvy wants him to go.[26]

Arány wrote the following epigram about Bálint de Szentkatolna’s pamphlet in which he attacked the Academy of Sciences and the Hungarian Ministry of Culture and Education,

On the pamphlet of Gábor Bálint. Poor Gábor Bálint, unhappy crafty Székely; how much you are suffering, what is the good in it![27]

From 1879 until 1892, the Székely wanderer lived in voluntary exile in the Middle East and Northern Africa. With the financial support of his friends and the Székely counties, he was however brought home. Finally, in 1893, he was appointed Chair of the Department of Ural-Altaic Languages at the Franz Jozef University in Transylvanian Kolozsvár.[28] Until his retirement in 1912, he would teach the so-called Turanian languages, including Japanese, Turkish, Tatar, Mongolian, Korean and Kabardian and he would study their grammatical and lexical relationships. In 1896, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Kolozsvár. Bálint de Szentkatolna did not establish a school, however. In 1918, six years after his retirement, the Ural-Altaic Department at the University of Kolozsvár was closed down.[29]

The Caucasian expedition

In 1895, Count Jenő Zichy invited Bálint de Szentkatolna to join his scientific expedition to the Caucasus.[30] The other members of the expedition were his colleague from the Franz Jozef University, the historian Lajos Szádeczky-Kardoss, a specialist on the history and culture of the Székely; Jacob Csellingarian, a Russian interpreter of Armenian origin, who happened to be in Hungary and had travelled in the Caucasus before; and the priest Dr. Mór Wosinszky, a trained  archaeologist. The purpose of the expedition was to search for the traces of the ancient Hungarians, who once lived in the territory of the Caucasian region. Count Zichy also had a private  agenda. He wanted to meet a Georgian prince named ‘Zici’ because he was convinced of the fact that the aristocratic family of this Georgian and his noble family were close relatives.

The leader and the main sponsor of the Caucasus-expedition was Count Jenő Zichy (1837-1906), a descendent of the Hungarian magnate Zichy-family, who played an important role in Hungarian history. His father, Count Ödön Zichy (1811-1894), was remarkable for his great activity in promoting art and industry in Austria-Hungary. He founded the Oriental Museum in Vienna and was one of the highest sponsors for the Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition to Franz Jozef Land. His son Jenő, inherited his father’s notable collection and followed in the footsteps of his father. Jenő studied Law in Germany, was a landowner, a member of the Hungarian Parliament and President of the Hungarian National Industrial Council. Because of his activities in the field of economy and industry, he was nicknamed the ‘industry count’.

 

It was not by accident that Count Zichy invited Bálint de Szentkatolna to be a member of his 1895 expedition. The Székely linguist, who only joined  Zichy’s first expedition to the Caucasus and Central Asia in 1895, and Count Zichy were actually brothers in arms. They shared the same views on the ancient history of the Hungarians. Bálint de Szentkatolna and Count Zichy both strongly opposed a one-sided Finno-Ugric origin of the Hungarians; and they both considered the Hungarians to be descendants of the Huns and hypothesized that one of ancient Hungarian homelands must have been somewhere in the area north of the Caucasus, neighbouring the South Russian Steppes, continuously inhabited by the Scythians, Sarmatians, Huns, Avars, Magyars and other steppe peoples, migrating from the East westwards. Hence, the expedition was meant to contribute evidence to this hypothesis by studying the languages, people and cultures of the Caucasus. 

In an interesting public lecture in the National Casino in Budapest on March 31, 1895, a month before the expedition would take off, Count Zichy explained the objectives of the expedition, arguing against an exclusive Finno-Ugric origin of the Hungarians. The ‘industry count’ claimed that the ancient Hungarians could not have originated from the Finno-Ugrians who wandered from the Gobi Desert, over the Ural Mountains, to their present location but that ‘they must have been an ancient race that occupied the space in the Maeotis marshes, i.e. the Caspian Sea, the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea, the Volga and the Don, stretching its influence to the Caucasus region, bordering on the Persian and Babylonian territories.’ According to Zichy, the Hungarian tribes settled thousands of years ago in this area. During several westward migrations, some tribes split off and turned to the north at the Volga, meeting the ancestors of the so-called Finno-Ugric peoples, including the Finns, Mordvins and Voguls. ‘This is supported by the fact that legends, folksongs and historic memories of these peoples refer to a southern climate.’ According to Count Zichy, the ancestors of the Hungarians did not come southwards from the Urals but were living in the so-called Scythian area north of the Caucasus in the first century A.D.

To support his claims, Zichy put forth the following arguments. Firstly, a number of classical Greek, Roman, Armenian and Byzantine sources point to the same people under different names, like Huns, Avars and Magyars. Secondly, in ancient sources, Hungarians are called the Western Huns. Thirdly, Alans, who originated from the eastern part of the Caucasus, joined  the armies of Attila the Hun (406?-453). This has also been spelled out in the work of Vámbéry. The remains of the Avar tribe that followed the route of the Huns westward settled in Dagestan and are now referred to as Lezgic. Fourthly, Hunfalvy had neglected the Hungarian chronicles and symbols that shed light on the westward migrations crossing the area neighbouring the northern Caucasus. Fifthly, Hunfalvy did not take into consideration the data linking the Huns to the Caucasus region. These data are in correspondence with the ancient sources, however. Sixthly, according to Zichy, there is a relationship between the name of the Huns and the other name of the Magyars, i.e. Hungar. Seventhly, from the fact that the tribes of the Hungars and Onogurs settled to the east of the Sea of Azov in the sixth century A.D., Zichy concluded that the Huns and Hungarians, i.e. the Magyars were the same people, spoke the same language and must have lived for a long time in the vicinity of the Caucasus area before they started to migrate westwards.  

The fact that the expedition was intended to challenge the official view on the Hungarian ancient history that  claims that the Hungarians originate from the Nordic Ural area might explain the lack of interest Count Zichy engaged from the Hungarian government and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Count Zichy complained: ’I had the duty to ask every minister who was in charge of one of my functions, including my membership of the Industrial Council, the Monuments’ Council and so on for a holiday (…) with the only exception of Ernő Dániel, I received no answer (…).[31] The Academy remained completely silent, although I only asked for a certificate to verify that I am Zichy.’[32] The expedition was however welcomed by the Russian Czar, Nicolas II (1868-1918) and his government, although the Hungarians were forbidden to dig in Russian soil.

This Zichy-expedition to the Caucasus has been recorded by Lajos Szádeczky-Kardoss in his stenographic travel diary. The original diary of the 1895 expedition – together with seven original photos – is presently kept in the library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. This diary has recently been decoded by the Hungarian stenographer Pálma Schenken, who succeeded in deciphering the 400 handwritten pages denoted in the style of the nineteenth-century Gabelsberger-Markovits version of stenography. The decipherment took Pálma Schenken twenty years of work and the manuscript is extremely hard to read. The travel diary gives a good impression of what Count Zichy and his team were doing in the Caucasus.

The 1895 expedition and the two others to the Caucasus and Central Asia, organized by Count Zichy in the following years,yielded much precious material to the Hungarian researchers of the Caucasus and also to the researchers of the ancient Hungarians. The ethnographical collections and photos of the Zichy-expeditions can be found in the Hungarian Ethnographical Museum in Budapest. The archaeological objects collected are kept in the collection of the Ferenc Hopp East Asian Museum.

In the Caucasus

The expedition to the Caucasus started on April 30, 1895, leaving from Budapest, and ended on August 14 of the same year, when the Russian-Austrian border was crossed. The members of the expedition had to prepare in advance, bringing tents, summer and winter clothes, weapons, ammunition, equipment for horse-riding and mountaineering, a minimum of food, photography equipment, phonographs, maps, books, medical supplies and so on. Within three and half months, they had travelled 20.000 kilometres by train, boat, horse farm-wagons, horse and camel. Count Zichy and his men wandered through deserts, over mountain tops several thousand metres high, and they visited cities and camps of ethnic Turkish nomads. They had to deal with different weather conditions like storms, rain, hail-stones and the expedition members had to stand the heat of 40 degrees Celsius. The travellers visited all the territories of the Caucasus, including Adyge, Circassia, Kabardino, North Ossetia, Ingushia, Chechnya, Dagestan, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Adzharia, Georgia and Azerbaijan. In all these territories, they stayed overnight in villages and towns.[33] Count Zichy and his research team met with a lot of different Caucasian people and tribes, speaking different languages, like Adyghe, Abkhaz, Chechen, Avar, Georgian,  Mingrelian, Karatsjaj, Circassian, Lezgic and so on. They took part in interesting meetings, festivities, celebrations, rituals and dinners with princes. Count Zichy and his men kept their supporters and families informed by letters and articles for Hungarian newspapers. Bálint de Szentkatolna claimed that each of the expedition members was left with his own branch of sciences ‘because there was complete freedom of study.’ This freedom of study was however interpreted completely differently by the leader of the expedition. In a letter from Odessa dated May, 10 1895, Count Zichy wrote: Szádeczky and Bálint are of no use to me, they are spending the whole day in the libraries. Csellingarian has picked up an ancient Russian with whom he is playing chess all day. Only Wosinszky is doing the research with me.’[34]      

From the Szádeczky-Kardoss’ diary we receive an image of the somewhat unworldly personality of Bálint de Szentkatolna, the Székely, as a highly talented scholar, always eager to learn, everywhere collecting books and impressing people with his extensive knowledge of languages but also as a hot-headed, opinionated, often quarrelling, eccentric person:

On May 1-2. The first night on Russia ground: ‘A Greek merchant travelled with us, who spoke French, English, Russian and Greek. He was quickly impressed by Bálint. He came into our department to chat and gave information about Odessa.’[35]

On May 2. Odessa. In Odessa, Bálint was looking for stones but the shops were closed.[36] Bálint did not find the book on linguistics and the Caucasus that was published in Tiblisi[37].

On May 2. Odessa. Bálint dominated conversations with officials. Already in the beginning of the expedition, Count Zichy wanted Bálint to keep his mouth shut because he was dominating the scene during conversations.[38]  Count Zichy was not amused by the fact that, at the reception of the Austro-Hungarian Consulate in Odessa, Bálint took the wife of Consul Henrik Müller, a nice Viennese woman, to one side.[39]

On May 3. In Odessa, Bálint met the Director of the City’s Museum, W. Jurgewics, who told him much about the Hungarian roots of place names in the Crimea.[40]

On May 7. Jevpatorija. In the morning, it turned out that Bálint has left his purse with 30 rubels and his passport in Odessa.

On May 9. Novorossijs. Bálint had not slept enough and made a lot of noise, this all was terrible.[41]

On May 14. Sometimes Bálint de Szentkatolna was not motivated to join the group for dinner and ate alone, like in Kamennij Most in Circassia.[42]

On May 22. In Voroncovko, the expedition met a Mongolian camel driver; Bálint was extremely happy and started to talk with him about the Hungarian-Mongolian ancestry.[43]

On May 27. The expedition reached Naltshik. In Atazsuk, the Kabardians did a  dance performance. Bálint did not want to dance but he walked around with a burka, a sleeveless frieze cape that is the typical outfit of the Kabardians, on his head.[44] After the dance, Bálint greeted the Kabardians like brothers.[45]

On May, 30. In Gori, Count Zichy asked the way, after having crossed the mountain range of the Caucasus and Bálint started to quarrel with him.[46]

On May 31. Bálint de Szentkatolna received a letter in Tiblisi that he was appointed as ordinary lecturer at the Franz Jozef University.

On June 3. Tiblisi. Bálint visited Inspector Lopatinsky, who was of Kabard origin and a linguist who had been writing grammars and dictionaries.[47]

On June 9, we arrived in Baku and what did Bálint do? He looked for books.[48]

On July 11. Tiblisi. It was discussed whether the Ossetian language is related to Hungarian. This is true for Alan. Gábor provoked the expedition members, stating that the Huns were just a branch of Hungarian people and spoke Hungarian. [49] The Székely language is simply the ancient Hun language, he said.[50]  

On July 13. The Count quarrelled with Bálint. Bálint wanted more time to read a book on the ‘Huns in Dagestan’.[51]

On July 18. The expedition was received by the Georgian Prince Zicianov. Count Zichy thought they were relatives due to the similarity of their family names. The Georgian noble family complained about Bálint’s uncivilized behaviour.[52]

On June 25. Petrovsk. Bálint said during lunch that people get lazy and stupid when eating fish.[53]

The last important visit the Zichy-expedition made was to St. Petersburg, where Count Zichy and his team arrived on August 2 and where they would stay until August 11. On August 6, the expedition members met a relative of Count Jenő Zichy, Count Mihály Zichy, the famous Hungarian painter, who was appointed as a court painter in St. Petersburg in 1847. Mihály Zichy was also highly honoured in Georgia, because he painted illustrations for ‘The Knight in the Panther’s Skin’, the Georgian national epic poem, written by the Georgian poet, Shota Rustaveli, in the twelfth century. Only Count Jenő Zichy was allowed to have an audience with Czar Nicolas II, who wanted to know everything about the expedition, asking Zichy whether they had found the Hungarians the researchers had been looking for.[54]

Kabardian dictionary

The classification of languages into three main branches, namely Turanian, i.e. all the agglutinative languages, Aryan, i.e, languages displaying flexion and Semitic, i.e. languages displaying root flexion, was initiated by Max Müller, a German linguist teaching in Oxford. His lectures on linguistics were translated into Hungarian in 1874 and were highly influential.[55] Bálint de Szentkatolna also accepted Müller’s classification and distinguished, in his report on his linguistic studies in Russia and Asia,  different branches of the Turanian languages, like Manchu, Mongolian, Turkish-Tatar, Finn-Ugric, Hungarian, Dravidian and so on.[56] Bálint de Szentkatolna was highly impressed by the Kabardians during the Zichy-expedition. The Székely scholar was convinced of the fact that their language must be an old Turanian language, as well as being closely related to Hungarian.

The Turanian language family is, however, something highly controversial, referring more to typological relationships than to genetic ones. The genetic relationships, involving massive grammatical and lexical affinities, were  not demonstrated convincingly. Bálint de Szentkatolna did not prove the genetic relationship between Kabardian and Hungarian either. However his descriptions of the so-called Turanian languages should deserve credit. The reason that his studies of Kabardian and other so-called Turanian languages stood the test of time is that he correctly considered these languages to be of the agglutinative type. Bálint de Szentkatolna did not waste his time with the reconstruction of phantom roots, unable to prove a genetic language relationship. Instead, he operated with roots and suffixes only.[57] From a methodological point of view, this is the right approach to investigate and analyze agglutinative languages. Bálint de Szentkatolna was a pioneer in comparing agglutinative languages on the root level, as he convincingly demonstrated in his ‘Parallels in the field of the Hungarian and Mongolian languages’, thereby heavily relying on Hungarian root dictionaries, like the ones of Kresznerics and Czuczor-Fogarasi.[58] As a consequence, the studies of Bálint de Szentkatolna can be used without exception, reflecting the state of the so-called Turanian languages in the second half of the nineteenth century. In conclusion, the relevance of his work on the Turanian languages can be summarized as follows:      

Firstly, Bálint de Szentkatolna correctly recognized that the Caucasus, especially the northern parts of it, played an important role in the ancient history of the Hungarians. This area had been used as a transit area by the equestrian people of the Steppes, such as the Scythians, Sarmatians, Huns, Avars and the Hungarians originating from the east and migrating westwards. Hence, due to the fact that the ancient Hungarians had been in contact with the peoples from the Caucasus area, language affinities between Hungarian and Caucasian languages are to be expected. A contemporary of Bálint de Szentkatolna, the Hungarian linguist Bernát Munkácsi, already referred to such affinities, including Hungarian and Ossetian.[59] Kabardian is also a good candidate because, before the Kabardians fell victim to the imperial  policy of Czarist Russia in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Kabardians, grouped in twelve tribes, dominated for at least 1500 years the whole area of the Northern Caucasus, along the Rivers Kuban, Terek and Malka. Only in 1864, long after the equestrian people of the Steppes had crossed the area in front of the Northern Caucasus westward, the number of the Kabardians was reduced heavily and their territory diminished substantially, when a half million of Adyghe-Kabardians had to leave the Northern Caucasus for Turkey.[60]

 

Péter Veres, a Hungarian ethnographer and researcher of the Caucasus, has recently observed some interesting linguistic affinities that can be found in the Kabardian dictionary of Bálint de Szentkatolna.[61] So far, Hungarian linguistics has no satisfactory etymology for the word isten meaning ‘God’. This word is classified as being of unknown origin. In his Kabardian dictionary, Bálint de Szentkatolna links Hungarian isten to the Kabardian form s-te-n that means ‘fire-giver’. The alternate Kabardian form Ošten refers to the place where the Gods live at the highest point of the Caucasus, namely at the top of Mount Elbrus that is 5642 metres high, found in the western mountain range of the Caucasus. Veres correctly hypothesizes that the etymology of Hungarian isten might be related to Kabardian s-te-n and Ošten. This link is of course not a proof of genetic relationship between Hungarian and Kabardian but it offers a highly intriguing trace of language contact that deserves further investigation.[62] 

Secondly, it took Bálint de Szentkatolna nine years to arrange the Kabardian language material he had been collecting in the Caucasus and to publish his Kabardian dictionary. Veres (2007) claims that this dictionary is the first dictionary of the Kabardian language, matching an acceptable scientific standard. It is true that, in the course of the Zichy-expedition, the Székely scholar did everything to extend his knowledge of Kabardian. He collected dictionaries of this language, especially in Odessa and Tiblisi. Furthermore, he contacted Dr. L. Lopatinskij, an education inspector in Tiblisi, who had written a Russian-Kabardian dictionary containing detailed information on the Kabardian language.[63] Finally, he worked with informants. One of his informants was the Circassian officer, Aghir Kanamat, who was for ten days the guide of the Zichy-expedition along the Kuban River in 1895.[64]

Due to the fact that the Kabardian language is so complicated, not everyone is able to transcribe this language properly. In the preface of his grammar Bálint de Szentkatolna refers to Dr. L. Loewe’s ‘A Dictionary of the Circassian Language: Containing all the most necessary words for the traveller, the soldier, and the sailor: with the exact pronunciation of each word in the English character (1854, London: Bell)’ as a bad example of a Kabardian dictionary. The Székely linguist notes that ‘the British author writes down the sounds of Adyghe with Latin and Arab letters. This English-Adyghe-Turkish and Adyghe-English-Turkish dictionary is largely an invention, such that no-one is able to understand the Adyghe language because the author had no idea of this language.’[65] Bálint de Szentkatolna succeeded however in transcribing the Kabardian items because he had an enormous training in writing down complicated languages during his travels in Asia.

Bálint de Szentkatolna’s Kabardian dictionary of 611 pages can still be used and it is of enormous value to the researchers of the Kabardian language and to the Kabardians themselves. In fact, Bálint de Szentkatolna’s dictionary is a kind of collective memory for present-day Kabardians, reflecting a part of the knowledge of their ancestors. Speakers of Kabardian can find a lot of authentic material in the dictionary, for, under each lemma of a given word, an example sentence with that word is included. Hence, the Kabardian communities were extremely grateful when, in 1994, several photocopies of Bálint de Szentkatolna’s dictionary ‘returned’ to the scientific centres in the cities of Maikop and Naltshik, where the Adyghe-Kabardian language is spoken and studied.[66] But not only the Adyghe-Kabardian speakers have rediscovered and credited the work of Bálint de Szentkatolna, the underestimated Székely linguist, who published the Kabardian studies on his own expense.[67] In 1994, in his birthplace, Szentkatolna, a scientific symposium took place, supported by the Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Székely linguist.[68] In 2006, Budapest was the location of a scientific conference to underline the merits of Gábor Bálint de Szentkatolna for the study of the ancient history of the Hungarians, the Hungarian language and other so-called Turanian languages, like the Caucasian language Kabardian.[69]

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Borcsa, János, ed. 1994. Szentkatolnai Bálint Gábor. Erdélyi Tudományos Füzetek 220. Kolozsvár: Az Erdélyi Múzeum-Egyesület.

Csetri, Elek. 2002. Kőrösi Csoma Sándor. Bukarest: Kriterion.

Czuczor, Gergely and János Fogarasi. 1862-1874. A magyar nyelv szótára I-VI. Pest.

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Kacziány, Géza. 2004. Magyar vértanuk könyve. Reprint of 1905 edition. Keckemét: Nemzeti Kincseinkért Egyesülete.

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Köpeczi, Béla, ed. 1994. The History of Transylvania. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.  

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Marácz, László. 2004. De oorsprong van de Hongaarse taal. In Het Babylonische Europa, eds. Annemarie van Heerikhuizen, Manet van Montfrans, Bruno Naarden, and Jan H. Reestman, 81-96. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press Salomé. 

Marácz, László. 2008. The Origin of the Hungarian Language. In Selected Studies in Hungarian History, ed. László Botos, 559-570. Budapest: Hun-idea. 

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László Marácz defended his Ph.d dissertation in General Linguistics at the University of Groningen in 1989. In 1991-92, Marácz was granted the prestigious Niels Stenson Fellowship and was a visiting scientist at the Linguistics Department of the MIT and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Since 1992, he has been affiliated as an assistant professor to the Department of European Studies of the University of Amsterdam. He has published on a range of topics in Humanities and Social Sciences, including European studies, historical linguistics, and cultural and linguistic diversity. His recent publications include, “Prospects on Hungarian as a Regional Official Language and Szeklerland’s Territorial Autonomy in Romania”, (2016) 23 International Journal on Minority and Group Rights, pp. 530-559, together with Zsombor Csata; editor of (2016) Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, European and Regional Studies, 9, Special Issue of the workshop on Philippe Van Parijs’ linguistic justice; “The Roots of Modern Hungarian Nationalism: A Case Study and a Research Agenda”, in: Lotte Jensen (ed), The Roots of Nationalism: National Identity Formation in Early Modern Europe, 1600-1815, (Heritage and Memory Studie), (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), pp. 235-250; “Les langues et la communication multilingues ont-elles dans le cadre de l’Europe sociale?”, (2015) 3 Revue Française des Affaires Sociales, pp. 115-133; “The Politics of Language Policies: Hungarian Linguistic Minorities in Central Europe”, (2015) 31 Politeja, pp. 45-65; Towards Eurasian Linguistic Isoglosses: The Case of Turkic and Hungarian, (Astana: International Turkic Academy, 2015); “The Politics of Multilingual and Non-Verbal Communication: Case Studies and a Research Agenda”, in: J. Backman and G. Wójcik (eds), The Way Things Aren’t: Deconstructing “Reality” to Facilitate Communication, (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2015), pp. 125-148. Professor Doctor Marácz is “honorary professor” of the L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University in Astana, Kazakhstan. He is vice-coordinator of the MIME consortium (www.project-mime.org) that won the European FP7-tender in 2013 under the reference of “SSH Call 2013.5.2-1: Multilingual Challenge for the European Citizen”. For profile, see http://www.uva.nl/en/profile/m/a/l.k.maracz/l.k.maracz.html.

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[1] See www.ethnologue.com.

[2] See Szentkatolnai Bálint (1900, 1904).

[3]  Compare www.ethnologue.com.

[4] Compare Szentkatolnai Bálint (1888).

[5] See Köpeczi (1994, 301-355).  

[6] See Palmay (2000, 33).  

[7] See Bakk (27-29) in Borcsa (1994).

[8] Compare Csetri (2002).

[9] Hence his name in Hungarian transcription: Kőrösi Csoma Sándor ‘Sándor Csoma from Kőrös’.

[10] See Hopkirk (1992, 88).

[11] Today’s Oradea in Romania.

[12] Kacziány (2004, 20-21).

[13] Náday and Sáfrán (1984, 39).

[14] Marácz (2008, 565-566).

[15] See Vámbéry (1870, 1877, 1882).

[16] Marcantonio (2002, 35-42)

[17] Pusztay (1994).

[18] Zágoni (2005, 10).

[19] Zágoni (2005, 8).

[20] Zágoni (2005, 124).

[21] Szentkatolna Bálint de (1897).

[22] Szentkatolnai Bálint (1877).

[23] Szentkatolnai Bálint (1877, IV).

[24] Péntek (1994, 14).

[25] Zágoni (2005, 13).

[26] Arany (1956, 439).  Budenzhez. Igazi vasfejű Székely a Bálint, nem megy arra, amerre Hunfalvy Pál int.

[27] Arany (1956, 439). Bálint Gábor röpiratára. Szegény Bálint Gábor, Boldogtalan góbé; Amennyit te szenvedsz, mi ahhoz a Jóbé!”. The Hungarian góbé is actually a nickname of the Székely attributing crafty capabilities to them.

[28] Today’s Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca Romania.

[29] Péntek (1994, 13).

[30] See Bodor (1994, 10).

[31] Baron Ernő Dániel was minister of Trade between 1895-1899 in the Bánffy-government. He was the nephew of the Hungarian honvéd general Ernő Kiss, who fought against the Austrians in the Hungarian War of  Indepencence, 1848-1849. Kiss was one of the 13 Martyrs of Arad, the thirteen Hungarian freedom fighter generals who were executed on October 6, 1849 in the Transylvanian city of Arad (presently in Romania) to reestablish Habsburg rule over Hungary. The Baron had another reason to support the Caucasian expedition of Zichy. The wealthy Dániel family, who had its estates in Transylvania, was of Armenian origin.    

[32] Szádeczky-Kardoss (2000, 11). 

[33]  See the map in Szadéczky-Kardoss (2000, 240). 

[34] Szádeczky-Kardoss (2000, 241).

[35] Szádeczky-Kardoss (2000, 25).

[36] Szádeczky-Kardoss (2000, 26).

[37] Szádeczky-Kardoss (2000, 27).

[38] Szádeczky-Kardoss (2000, 27).

[39] Szádeczky-Kardoss (2000, 29).

[40] Szádeczky-Kardoss (2000, 28).

[41] Szádeczky-Kardoss (2000, 42).

[42] Szádeczky-Kardoss (2000, 63).

[43] Szádeczky-Kardoss (2000, 91).

[44] Szádeczky-Kardoss (1917, 304).

[45] Szádeczky-Kardoss (2000, 103).

[46] Szádeczky-Kardoss (2000, 114).

[47] Szádeczku-Kardoss (2000, 128).

[48] Szádeczky-Kardoss (2000, 131).

[49] Szádeczky-Kardoss (2000, 192-193).     

[50] In an article written in 1917, Szádeczky-Kardoss (1917, 371-372) quotes Bálint de Szentkatolna(i), claiming  that the etymology of the name szekély is derived from the root zich ‘sik’. This is the name of the Kabardians in their own language meaning ‘chair, dwelling’. The root of székely, szék in Hungarian has the same consonantal root form and the same meaning as its Kabardian counterpart. According to Bálint de Szentkatolna, the suffix -ely of székely is related to the suffix -li/eli used in the Caucasian languages and Turkish-Tatarian to express origin from a place. If ‘szék, sik’ is related to the name ‘Scythia’, then székely means ‘originating from szék’, i.e. ‘Scythia’. According to Bálint de Szentkatolna, this supports the historic fact that the Hungarians and the Székely come originally from Scythia.       

[51] Szádeczky-Kardoss (2000, 194).

[52] Szádeczky-Kardoss (2000, 201).

[53] Szádeczky-Kardoss (2000, 158).

[54] Szádeczky-Kardoss (2000, 238).

[55] Péntek (1994, 17).

[56] Zágoni (2005, 143).

[57] Szentkatolnai Bálint (1888, 45).

[58] Compare Szentkatolnai Bálint (1877), Kresznerics (1831) and Czuczor-Fogarasi (1862-1874).

[59] See Munkácsi (1901).

[60] Szentkatolnai Bálint (1901, 10-11).

[61] See Veres (2007).

[62] The Persian item Yazdan meaning ‘God’ might be a good candidate as the final source of the Hungarian word isten. If this etymology turns out to be correct, the Caucasian languages, like Kabardian, where variants of this word appear, have been mediating between Persian and the languages of the equestrian people of the Steppes, including ancient Hungarian. Another option is that the ancient Hungarians originate from an area much closer to Persia, present-day Iran, than the Caucasus.  

[63] L.G. Lopatinskij’s book in Russian-latin transcription is mentioned in the preface of Bálint’s Kabardian grammar ‘Russko-kabardinski slovar [Russian-Kabardian Dictionary]’, in Sbornik materialov dlya opisaniya mestnostei I plemen Kavkaza [Collection of Materials for the Description of the Districts and Tribes of the Caucasus], Tiflis (Tbilisi), vol. 12, 1891. [With index].

[64] Szentkatolnai Bálint (1900, 1).

[65] Bálint (1900, 4-5).

[66] See Veres (2007).

[67] His grammar is written with his own hand-writing.

[68] See papers in Borcsa (1994).

[69] See studies in Obrusánszky (2007).

Blog

Said al-Mufti
In memory of Said al-Mufti (1898-1989)

On 16 March 2018, the Circassian Association held a memorial event for Said al-Mufti (Habjoka), former Prime Minister of Jordan.

Mohammad Azoga delivered the following speech (translated here by Tamara Mufti). It provides a snapshot of family and political life in the nascent Hashemite Kingdom and the central role of the Circassian community at the time.

Bibars Natcho
Meet Bibars Natcho, the Muslim CSKA Moscow midfielder that became Israel’s first ever non-Jewish captain

Exclusive: The Circassian central midfielder hopes to make his late father proud once more when CSKA Moscow take on Arsenal in the Europa League quarter-finals.

By Michael Yokhin | The Independent

circassianworld website
CircassianWorld Website Updated and Renewed

The Circassian World (CW) website was created in February 2005. The website has been offline since August 2013 and now, as of 1 January 2018, it is back online with an updated format to take up from where it left off. One of CW’s most important goals has been to create an informative resource website for Circassians and non-Circassians, who wish to learn more about the heritage, culture, and history of the Adyghe and Abkhaz people.

Mythology

  • Narts
Music of the Gods: Amisch and His Magic Flute
  • Nart Sagas
Nart Sagas From The Caucasus, by John Colarusso
  • Nart Sagas
Prometheus among the Circassians, by John Colarusso
  • Circassian Myths
Myths from the Forests of Circassia, by John Colarusso
  • Circassian Myths
The Woman of the Myths: the Satanaya Cycle, by John Colarusso
  • Paganism
Hantse Guashe: A Ceremony of the Puppet Princess

Personalities

The Legendary Circassian Prince Inal, by Vitaliy Shtybin
May 16, 2020
The legendary Prince Inal is a key-figure for the Circassians, Abazinians and Abkhazians, a unifier of lands who founded the main princely generic branches of the plain ...
Zaur Naloev | Нало Заур (1928-2012)
February 05, 2018
This article is devoted to one of the brightest personalities of not only Kabardian but the whole Adyghe nation - to Zaur Magomedovich Naloev. He is a scholar-enlightener who ...

Republics

Republic of Adygheya
Republic of Kabardino-Balkaria
Republic of Karachay-Cherkessia

Recently Added

  • Obituary: On Barasbi Bgazhnokov (1947-2020), by Sufian Zhemukhov
  • Jehovah’s Witnesses were acquitted of extremism charges in Kabardino-Balkaria!
  • Circassian activists achieve demolition of monument to Russian soldiers in Adler
  • Representatives of Circassian society have begun collecting signatures to an appeal to Putin about a new monument in Adler

Archival Materials

mt elbrus first ascent
  • Archives
Khilar Khashirov, first man in the world who climbed to the top of mt Elbrus

Khilar Khashirov is the first man in the world who climbed to the top of mt #Elbrus without special training. He was a guide for Imperial Russian army scientific expedition led by General Georgi Emmanuel. Khashirov's nationality is claimed both by Kabardians and Karachays. Georgi Emanuel's biographer Prince Golitsyn, identified Khilar specifically as a Circassian from the region of Kabarda. [Zhizneopisannie Generela ot Kavalerii Emanuelya (Life-Sketches of the Cavalry General Emanuel), Moscow, 1851] but Turkic tribesmen claim him as ethnically one of their own.

A detailed research about it can be read in Russian at: http://www.mountain.ru/article/article_display1.php?article_id=4233 “Восхождение на Эльбрус в 1829 году. Архивные материалы.”

Here is a news from the "Morning Post"  (London, England)
The Scientific Expedition To The Caucasus (Thursday 29 October 1829) 

               

Another clipping from the "[Glasgow] Evening Citizen" - Monday 14 September 1868, page 2.

  • Archives
Fund for the Circassians, 1864 - C.Hoare & Co.

In June 1864, a subscription account entitled ‘Fund for the Circassians’ was opened at Hoare’s Bank. The account was short lived: no donations were received after October that year. And the sum raised, £77-15-9, was modest. But the story behind the account provoked scenes similar to those being witnessed across Europe today.

Nestled beside the Black Sea, in a landscape of dramatic mountains and lush fertile valleys, Circassia was just one of a numberless jumble of ethnic groups that comprised the Northern Caucasus. Russia loomed large to the north, while to the south lay the mighty Ottoman and Persian Empires. For hundreds of years, much of the Northern Caucasus had been controlled by the two latter powers. But during the nineteenth century Russia launched a determined bid to seize control of the entire territory. Over half a century, the Tzar’s armies invaded, conquered and annexed their way across the region, subjugating or expelling the indigenous populations as they went. The resistance these armies encountered along the way was intense. And few resisted more fiercely than the Circassians, some of whom held out for forty years. Ultimately, however, they were no match for the Russian military machine. In April 1864, their last stronghold, Vardar, capitulated and the outlook for the Circassians themselves appeared bleak.

Download the full-text document in PDF format

Source: Hoare’s Bank | C. Hoare & Co. is the United Kingdom's oldest privately owned bank.

  • Archives
Photos from Count Eugene Zichy’s expedition to the Caucasus in 1895

By late Amjad Jaimoukha

The Hungarian Count Eugene [Jenő] Zichy (1837-1906) wanted to investigate the original seat of the Magyars (Hungarians). Since the Circassians were called “Zikhi”, the Count was convinced that his roots were to be found amongst the Circassians. His Circassian guide in Circassia was Kanamat Agirov [Аджыр Къэнэмэт].

He published his account of the expedition:

Zichy, E. (de), “Voyages au Caucase et en Asie Centrale”, Budapest, 1897. (2 volumes)

Photographs:

1. Kabardians of the Het’ox’wschiqwe (Atazhukin; ХьэтIохъущыкъуэ) princely family, Baksan Valley, 1895.

2. Kabardian Woman of Het’ox’wschiqwe (Atazhukin), Baksan Valley, 1895.


3. Kabardians of the Heghwndoqwe (Хьэгъундокъуэ) clan, 1895.

 4. Kabardian cemetery, Dubaruk village, 1895. Count Eugene [Jenő] Zichy is second from right.


5. Kabardians in X’wmeren (Khumara) village, 1895. [Now part of Cherkessia in the Karachai-Cherkess Republic]

6. Kabardian elders, Kabarda [Eastern Circassia], 1895.

For more on the expedition:

László Károly Marácz, “Gábor Bálint de Szentkatolna (1844-1913) and the Study of Kabardian”, in Françoise Companjen, et al (eds.), “Exploring the Caucasus in the 21st Century: Essays on Culture, History and Politics in a Dynamic Context”, Amsterdam University Press, 2010, pp. 27-46. 

András Maracskó, “Hungarian Orientalism and the Zichy Expeditions”, Master of Arts thesis, Department of History, Central European University, 2014. [www.etd.ceu.hu/2014/maracsko_andras.pdf]

Szádeczky-kardoss Lajos, “Zichy-expedíció, Kaukázus, Közép-Ázsia, 1895” [“Zichy Expedition, Caucasus, Central Asia, 1895”], Hungarian Ostörténeti Research and Publications, 2002. [contains precious photographs taken in Circassia/Kabarda in 1895]

War and Exile

Ottoman Policies on Circassian Refugees in the Danube Vilayet in the 1860s and 1870s by Ventsislav Muchinov
Eagles in the Caucasus: Polish-Circassian cooperation against Russia in the 19th century
Importance of Russian-Turkish War of 1877-1878 for the Circassian History, by Samir H. Hotko
David Urquhart's holy war, by Joseph Brewda and Linda de Hoyos
Caucasian War: History and Representations by Khasan Kasumov
The North Caucasus: Russia's Long Struggle to Subdue the Circassians by Paul B. Henze

Circassian Etiquette Адыгэ Хабзэ

Adyghe Xabze (or Khabze, Xabza) is an orally transmitted rigid and complex code in which customs and social norms were enshrined. This system of morals had evolved to ensure that strict militaristic discipline was maintained at all times to defend the country against the many invaders who coveted Circassian lands. 

In addition, social niceties and graces greased the wheels of social interaction, and a person’s good conduct ensured his survival and prosperity.

Read more

Circassian Customs & Traditions

CIRCASSIAN CUSTOMS & TRADITIONS

by Amjad Jaimoukha
Late Circassian writer and publicist (1964 - 2017)

Circassian customs and social norms are enshrined in an orally-transmitted code called ‘Adyghe Xabze’—‘Circassian Etiquette’ [«адыгэ хабзэ»]. This rigid and complex system of morals had evolved to ensure that strict militaristic discipline was maintained at all times to defend the country against the many invaders who coveted Circassian lands. 

Read more

Interview Popular

  • Interview
Interview with Paul Goble, March 2008
April 09, 2009
  • Interview
Interview with Paul B. Henze, August 2008
April 09, 2009
  • Interview
Musa Shanib: The 21st of May Sounds The Alarm Again!
May 10, 2009

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reflections on the caucasus

AbkhazWorld

CW’s aim is to raise awareness of Circassian culture, history and contemporary politics in global academia, journalism and policy making circles to pave the way for "Circassian Studies" to be recognized as a constituent part of Caucasian Studies.

Analysis
Nationalism, politics, and the practice of archaeology in the Caucasus
April 29, 2020
How Russian state pressure on regional languages is sparking civic activism in the North Caucasus by Mikail Kaplan
June 26, 2018
E-Library
Act of Kabarda 1805: the New Document About Zhankhot Kushiku, The Last Grand Prince of Kabardia, by Albek and Astemir Abazov
January 20, 2018
An Illustrated Description of the Russian Empire by Robert Sears
December 28, 2017

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